Nearly 50 years since forming his first garage-rock band as a Detroit teenager – they were called the Earwigs, and then became the Spiders – Alice Cooper remains a master of the macabre. On tour, he continues to play ringleader to a terrifying brood of talented musicians who have rotated in and out of his group, while proving year after year to still have a few shocking tricks under his signature top hat.

Cooper, whose grandly theatrical style is a smart choice for a rare all-out rock show at Segerstrom Center for the Arts next week, has long devised imaginative ways to off Alice since developing his act in the early ’70s. (He and the original Alice Cooper Band were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2011.)

He’s done death by hanging, used the electric chair and firing squads, and his beheadings by guillotine are iconic. At 65, he still snarls and taunts his audiences, as he has been again on his current Raise the Dead Tour. The three-part, 90-minute performance, he shared by phone recently, blends plenty of his classics – “Welcome to My Nightmare,” “School’s Out,” “I’m Eighteen,” “No More Mr. Nice Guy” – alongside newer cuts, like “Caffeine” and the subtly titled “I’ll Bite Your Face Off.”

The show was designed with 3,000-seat theaters in mind, Cooper says. He has pulled it off in larger arenas and outdoor amphitheaters but prefers smaller venues, so the crowd can fully savor every detail – and discern what’s going on as he loses his mind and winds up bound in a straitjacket.

“That’s when the show just really sparkles,” he says. “The first third is ‘Glam Alice’: it’s Alice from 1970-1975 and it’s flashy, rock ’n’ roll, and you don’t get a chance to catch your breath. Then it’s ‘Nightmare Alice’ and the mood changes into something darker and it’s a bit more edge-of-your-seats type stuff.

“At the end of that, Alice gets his head cut off and the nurse rolls him off on a gurney – and he wakes up in the graveyard of Hollywood vampires. There are guys there that he used to drink with: Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, John Lennon and Keith Moon. It’s really just all my dead, drunk friends, and we do a cover of a song from each of them. That’s really a special, nice hard-rock moment.”

Those renditions are strengthened by Cooper’s band, including his ace, Orianthi, the 28-year-old Australian virtuoso who first gained noticed internationally in 2009, at about the same time her stint supporting Michael Jackson’s This Is It concert series was hastened by his death. She joined Mr. “Billion Dollar Babies” two years later. Her shining moment in the new show is a solo amid their Hendrix homage, though when it comes to antics beyond her fretboard, Cooper says she was initially reluctant to participate.

For “I’ll Bite Your Face Off,” for instance, “It’s just her and I, and I told her: ‘We’re Ike and Tina up here baby.’ At first she was a little bit back, but by the end of the tour she had dead birds in her hair, blood dripping from her mouth and she had ‘kill me’ written on her arm. She got way, way into it. She’s a jewel and she gets a standing ovation every night after doing ‘Foxy Lady.’”

Cooper is acutely aware, though, that Orianthi is the lone woman in his lineup. “She’s got five big brothers up on stage with her, you know. We all treat her like she’s a little sister and we don’t let anyone near her. She’ll go: ‘Can I have a little freedom here?’ And the answer is no!”

He’s joking about keeping her on such a short leash, but as a father of three, he’s naturally protective. Offstage, the persona of Alice Cooper melts away and the devout Christian, dedicated family man and avid golfer born Vincent Furnier re-emerges. After the tour wraps in Las Vegas the day before Thanksgiving, he and his family – wife Sheryl, his 32-year-old actress daughter Calico, 28-year-old musician son Dash and 21-year old dancer and makeup artist Sonora Rose – will celebrate with a traditional meal together at home in Phoenix.

“We’re as Norman Rockwell as it gets,” he says with a laugh. “Our Thanksgiving will be severed-head-free. You’d want to think that when you lifted that big silver top, that on the plate there’d be a head instead of a turkey – but it’s a turkey, and that’s what makes the Alice Cooper thing all the more creepy, the fact that we are so normal.

“They wanted to do a reality show about us and I said, ‘But we’re so boring! We go to church on Sunday. We have dinner together. No one swears, no one does drugs and no one is an alcoholic. We’re no fun at all!’”

Cooper learned early in his career that he’d have to separate himself from his alter ego – and the drinking and drugs that ultimately claimed some of his closest friends and colleagues.

“Alice is alive only during show time,” he explains. “He only wants to be in front of an audience, so when the curtain comes down, it’s back to just me again. In the early days there was a gray area there, because I was drinking and living that life – and I finally looked around and realized that’s what killed Jim Morrison and that’s what killed Janis Joplin and Hendrix, trying to live that life all of the time.

“In order to live like that you have to fuel it with drugs or alcohol, because you can’t possibly be that character all of the time and be sane. And 27 years old was the expiration date. I said, ‘Geez, I’m going to have to learn to navigate this.’ So I made a clean surgical cut between what is Alice and what is me, and I’m sure that Steve Tyler and Iggy Pop do the same thing. Anyone who has survived doing this for this long has learned how to do that.”

Of course, even when he isn’t on stage people still call him Alice. He often encounters fans while on the golf course and happily poses for photos in more leisurely attire.

“Alice Cooper has never been on a golf course – Alice hates golf,” he says with a laugh. “I play golf every morning and I love to shop. I definitely contribute to the economy, and Alice hates all of that. The difference is that people know I’m very approachable: I’ll sign any autograph, I’ll take any photo, I’ll talk with you. But as the character, as Alice – you’d never ask him for an autograph. He’d bite your hand off!

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